This review article charts the general direction of scholarship in James Baldwin
studies between the years 2015 and 2016, reflecting on important scholarly
events and publications of the period and identifying notable trends in
criticism. While these years witnessed a continuing interest in the relationship
of Baldwin’s work to other authors and art forms as well as his
transnational literary imagination, noted in previous scholarly reviews, three
newly emergent trends are notable: an increased attention to Baldwin in journals
primarily devoted to the study of literatures in English, a new wave of
multidisciplinary studies of Baldwin, and a burgeoning archival turn in Baldwin
criticism.

James Baldwin criticism from 2001 through 2010 is marked by an increased appreciation for
Baldwin’s entire oeuvre including his writing after the mid 1960s. The question of his
artistic decline remains debated, but more scholars find a greater consistency and power
in Baldwin’s later work than previous scholars had found. A group of dedicated Baldwin
scholars emerged during this period and have continued to host regular international
conferences. The application of new and diverse critical lenses—including cultural
studies, political theory, religious studies, and black queer theory—contributed to more
complex readings of Baldwin’s texts. Historical and legal approaches re-assessed Baldwin’s
relationship to the Civil Rights and Black Power movements and new material emerged on
Baldwin’s decade in Turkey. Some historical perspective gave many critics a more nuanced
approach to the old “art” vs. “politics” debate as it surfaced in Baldwin’s initial
reception, many now finding Baldwin’s “angry” work to be more “relevant” than “out of
touch” as it was thought of during his lifetime. In the first decade of the new
millennium, three books of new primary source material, a new biography, four books of
literary criticism, three edited collections of critical essays, two special issues of
journals and numerous book chapters and articles were published, marking a significant
increase not only in the quantity, but the quality of Baldwin criticism.

The acceleration of interest in Baldwin’s work and impact since 2010 shows no signs of
diminishing. This resurgence has much to do with Baldwin—the richness and passionate
intensity of his vision—and also something to do with the dedicated scholars who have
pursued a variety of publication platforms to generate further interest in his work. The
reach of Baldwin studies has grown outside the academy as well: Black Lives Matter
demonstrations routinely feature quotations from Baldwin; Twitter includes a “Son of
Baldwin” site; and Raoul Peck’s 2016 documentary, I Am Not Your Negro, has received
considerable critical and popular interest. The years 2010–13 were a key period in moving
past the tired old formula—that praised his early career and denigrated the works he wrote
after 1963—into the new formula—positing Baldwin as a misunderstood visionary, a
wide-reaching artist, and a social critic whose value we are only now beginning to
appreciate. I would highlight four additional prominent trends that emerged between 2010
and 2013: a consideration of Baldwin in the contexts of film, drama, and music;
understandings of Baldwin globally; Baldwin’s criticism of American institutions; and
analyses of Baldwin’s work in conversation with other authors.

James Baldwin might be imagined as reaching his greatest level of popularity within this current decade. With the growth of social media activist movements like Black Lives Matter, which captures and catalyzes off a Baldwinian rage, and the publishing of works directly evoking Baldwin, his voice appears more pronounced between the years of 2013 and 2015. Scholars in Baldwin studies, along with strangers who were turned into witnesses of his literary oeuvre, have contributed to this renewed interest in Baldwin, or at least have been able to sharpen the significance of the phenomenon. Publications and performances highlight Baldwin’s work and how it prefigured developments in critical race and queer theories, while also demonstrating Baldwin’s critique as both prophetic and “disturbingly” contemporary. Emerging largely from Baldwin’s timelessness in social and political discourse, and from the need to conjure a figure to demystify the absurd American landscape, these interventions in Baldwin studies follow distinct trends. This essay examines the 2013–15 trends from four vantages: an examination of a return, with revision, to popular work by Baldwin; identifying Baldwin’s work as a contributor to theoretical and critical methodology; Baldwin and intertextuality or intervocality; and a new frontier in Baldwin studies.

11
Gary Banham
Kant and the ends of criticism
Since the beginning of the 1990s there has been a marked revival of interest in both
Kant and aesthetics.1 This revival has been accompanied with a move beyond the
theoretical positions that sought to displace the notion of aesthetics and often requires
a rethinking of the relationship between criticism and philosophy. I wish to present
here an account of Kant’s ‘invention’ of aesthetics that allows its terms to become both
operative within and yet also transformed by the practice of critical engagement with

Introduction
It is ironic that the surest
indication of the durability of the Third Way is the continuing
attention paid to it by its critics. This collection has provided a
flavour of the range of such criticism from different disciplinary,
analytical and political perspectives. But what general conclusions
can be drawn from contributions such as

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Robert Young and the ironic authority
of postcolonial criticism
When I chanced on postcolonial scholar Robert Young’s Textual Practice
review of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s Outside in the Teaching Machine, I
was startled to find an attack on Benita Parry among its pages.1 It comes
early on, when Young is preparing the ground for a detailed exposition of
Spivak’s book by comparing Spivak’s general critical standing with that of
Edward Said and Homi Bhabha (who together create Young’s chief constellation of postcolonial

Readers and critics alike, for the past sixty years, generally agree that Baldwin is a
major African-American writer. What they do not agree on is why. Because of his artistic
and intellectual complexity, Baldwin’s work resists easy categorization and Baldwin
scholarship, consequently, spans the critical horizon. This essay provides an overview of
the three major periods of Baldwin scholarship. 1963–73 is a period that begins with the
publication of The Fire Next Time and sees Baldwin grace the cover of Time magazine. This
period ends with Time declaring Baldwin too passé to publish an interview with him and
with critics questioning his relevance. The second period, 1974–87, finds critics
attempting to rehabilitate Baldwin’s reputation and work, especially as scholars begin to
codify the African-American literary canon in anthologies and American universities.
Finally, scholarship in the period after Baldwin’s death takes the opportunity to
challenge common assumptions and silences surrounding Baldwin’s work. Armed with the
methodologies of cultural studies and the critical insights of queer theory, critics set
the stage for the current Baldwin renaissance.

The intellectual connection between James Baldwin and Lionel Trilling, and the resonances
across their criticism, are more substantial than scholarly and biographical treatments
have disclosed. For Trilling, Baldwin’s writings were notable for their deviation from
most humanistic inquiry, which he considered insufficiently alert to the harms and
depredations of culture. Baldwin’s work became for Trilling a promising indication that
American criticism could be remade along the lines of a tragic conception of culture
deriving from Freud. This essay concentrates on a relevant but neglected dynamic in
American letters—the mid-twentieth-century tension between Freudian thought and American
humanistic inquiry evident in fields like American Studies—to explain the intellectual
coordinates within which Trilling developed an affinity for Baldwin’s work. The
essay concludes by suggesting that the twilight of Freud’s tragic conception of
culture, which figured centrally in the modernist critical environment in which
Baldwin and Trilling encountered one another, contributed to an estrangement whereby the
two came to be seen as unrelated and different kinds of critics, despite the consonance of
their critical idioms during the 1940s and 1950s.